


Songs of a Foreign Land

by thesometimeswarrior



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Ficlet, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-28
Updated: 2018-02-28
Packaged: 2019-03-16 08:15:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13632318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesometimeswarrior/pseuds/thesometimeswarrior
Summary: This is banishment,Kanna thinks when she arrives in the Southern Water Tribe.





	Songs of a Foreign Land

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iceshade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iceshade/gifts).



> This is my first time participating in Purimgifts, and I'm super excited! I was fairly strongly inspired by the Purim story here, and by Vashti in particular.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!
> 
> Title inspired by Psalm 137 in the Hebrew Bible.

_This is banishment_ , Kanna thinks, when she hits the glaciers on the opposite end of the world, as soon as she is able and aware enough after weeks at sea to acknowledge that yes, she is alive, even though she half-expected the spirits to kill her for this act of defiance of the natural order.

She is alive, she will be safe in the South now, and she won’t be chained to a man whom she hardly knows and who knows nothing about her except what her batted eyelashes look like on her submissive face. Won’t be forced to perform for him and bear his children…but the price is banishment. She had loved (loves still? she is uncertain) her home, the way the city at the North Pole glittered in the moonlight, the towering palaces and roads of ice. The South is a haven, but it is not, will never, she suspects, be home. 

But she is alive. Banished, but alive. Her first instinct is to thank Tui and La—who are so far away now, in their Spirit Oasis in the North—for sparing her from a watery grave. Her second is to spit in the ocean and up at the moon. _How dare you,_ she says to them. _How dare you make risking death my only option. How dare you make this feel like a blessing in comparison._

They don’t respond. Perhaps they can’t hear her, here in exile. Perhaps they’re merely hiding their faces from her, for reasons she cannot begin to understand. Perhaps they’ve abandoned her, now that she’s strayed from what she has always been taught that they want from her. Or perhaps they’re not there at all, and the moon is just the moon and the ocean is just water and the fish that live in the Spirit Oasis are just fish. Perhaps they only ever were anything else in her imagination.

The Southern chieftain doesn’t ask too many questions, grants her leave to stay once she assures him that the North will in all likelihood not pursue her, and assigns her land on which to live.

“Are you a Waterbender?” he asks.

“No.” (She doesn’t add that she wouldn’t know how to Waterbend, even if she had been born with the ability.) 

“Well, then,” the chief responds kindly. “I’ll assign someone to help you build a house. It’s much easier if you can bend the ice and snow…”

“I will be fine on my own," she responds curtly.

He shrugs and points her in the direction of her land once she tells him that she’s sure, and then she gets to work, piling and packing snow into ever-sturdier clumps that gradually begin to resemble a hut.

It’s banishment, true, but _home_ is something she will build for herself now, with her own two hands, just like the life which finally, _finally_ belongs completely to her.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Please consider leaving a comment!


End file.
